David Pogue's technology wish list is interesting.  I have often joined him in wondering why the hell clock radios don't have keypads.  (I've only seen one, on a circa-1979 Radio Shack model.)  It's honestly why I use my cell phone alarm as an alarm clock (which means I have to somewhat carefully plan when to charge my phone, as there's not a convenient spare outlet in the bedroom) instead of the clock radio.

And seriously:  how hard could it be for electronics manufacturers to label their AC adapters?  Amen, brother.

Comments

[Keith Irwin]

I enjoyed that as a whole, but I have to say that his complaining about batteries not getting better is ridiculous. To begin with asserting that batteries haven't been getting better is assuming that laptops aren't consuming more power, and frankly, on average, they are. The battery technology has been improving, but laptops have been using more power. We could have more battery life, but it would mean bigger, heavier batteries or reduced speed of computation. Most companies figure that three hours is enough for most people and engineer their products accordingly. If you want more, the easiest solution is to buy a spare battery.

The other three changes that he describes as happening in the last 10 years are not three examples of separate trends where improvements are happening. Both the cameras and the computer processors are related to the ability to make smaller and smaller gates on integrated circuits. And the change in number of songs is actually mostly because they started making hard-drive based mp3 players. If you only said 20 songs to 200 (i.e. comparing flash-based players to newer flash-based players), then it would be part of that same trend as the other two.

But why only complain about batteries? Cars should be getting 10 times better gas mileage. Diseases should be 10 times less common or easier to cure. Tomatoes should be 10 times tastier. Houses should be 10 times cheaper. Airplanes should go 10 times faster. Kittens should be 10 times cuter.

The fact of the matter is that not all technological problems can be solved by increasing the number of gates per square inch on a piece of silicon or the number of discernible patches of magnetic material on a spinning disk, and these are the only two things that we've been able to get exponential increases at. And even those increases are going to top out at some point.

If he wants to create a battery research company, he's welcome to, but he'll find that there are quite a number of them out there already. It's just a problem with no easy solution.

Keith